Reception According to a Data Transfer Protocol of Data Directed to Any of a Plurality of Destination Entities for Data Extraction

1. A data processing system for receiving data from a network, and processing that data in accordance with a network protocol to extract traffic data therefrom, the data processing system having: a memory; a network interface for receiving the data from the network and storing the data in the memory; an operating system for supporting one or more applications; an application supported by the operating system; and a protocol processing entity providing an application programming interface (API) configured to process the received data in accordance with a network protocol to extract traffic data therefrom, the protocol processing entity being arranged to perform protocol processing of the received data in the memory in response to signaling from a thread of the application to request whether data is available for one or more endpoints of the data processing system.

2. The data processing system as claimed in claim 1 , wherein the protocol processing entity is a software entity that runs at a higher level than the operating system.

3. The data processing system as claimed in claim 2 , wherein the protocol processing entity runs at user level.

4. The data processing system as claimed in claim 2 , wherein the protocol processing entity is constituted by a function library.

5. The data processing system as claimed in claim 1 , wherein the memory comprises a plurality of buffers each associated with a respective endpoint of the data processing system.

6. The data processing system as claimed in claim 1 , wherein the memory comprises a buffer for storing data indicating events, and the network interface device is arranged to, on receiving data from the network, store it in the memory and also store data indicating a corresponding event in the event buffer.

7. The data processing system as claimed in claim 1 , wherein the said signaling is a select( )and/or a poll( )call.

8. The data processing system as claimed in claim 7 , wherein the call is resolved by the data processing system by means of a static linkage.

9. The data processing system as claimed in claim 7 , wherein the call is resolved by the data processing system by means of a dynamic linkage.

10. The data processing system as claimed in claim 1 , wherein the protocol processing entity is arranged to perform protocol processing of data in the context of the thread that signaled the protocol processing entity to do so.

11. The data processing system as claimed in claim 1 wherein the network protocol is TCP/IP.

12. The data processing system as claimed in claim 1 , wherein the protocol processing entity supports BSD, Posix or Winsock network sockets.